I already know I’m unreasonable! Posting for traffic as I haven’t had much luck on other boards.
My dd has been recently diagnosed with anorexia. She has some traits which would have previously been diagnosed as atypical anorexia, but she has restricted her diet so severely she has made herself seriously unwell. She is ok with textures etc, it’s the calorie content she is concerned with; she feels she is overweight. She will eat some high calorie food, especially if it’s homemade, and others she will not tolerate due to the ‘calories’ in a way that is not logical. For example she had a (normal) McDonald’s meal but will not eat anything at home which is cooked in vegetable oil as she says it needs to be butter due to the calories. She is now underweight, from a healthy-but top end of healthy starting point, so has lost a lot of weight. Our clinician feels she is very underweight. (She is incredibly tall so it is really genuinely hard to tell. She is possibly one of the tallest for her age so BMIs etc are all irrelevant).
Since diagnosis, she has started to exhibit a lot of worrying traits and I am beginning to wonder if she has previously masked ASD traits. They have already queried this at the clinic, but other than a persistent issue with sound, she has always presented as emotionally mature, social, and extremely good at mediation. This was picked up on at school from an early age.
Now that she is talking, she has spoken about clothes not feeling ‘right’ - she says it’s not that they’re uncomfortable, they just don’t feel right. She constantly refers to feeling uneven, and she is really struggling with noise; noisy environments or repeated sound like a car alarm. She can’t cope with change over meals, and says that she is feeling totally overwhelmed, and doesn’t feel right inside her head. She has also taken to marching around the room and tantrumming. This is all different from her usual presentation. She is also struggling with her skin, picking at her hands until they bleed, and starting to wear jewellery so that she can fidget with it.
A lot of this I had been putting down to the anorexia, and have already discussed the marching and noise to the ED team. I am now worrying that actually she may be on the spectrum but just successfully masked until now. She does have the classic traits of successful maskers - she is bright and a perfectionist. But I can’t get past her other characteristics of being highly reflective, and incredibly empathetic, and genuinely so understanding of emotions, all of which she exhibited at a young age, ie too young to have learnt. She has younger siblings and is very understanding of their needs, and very loving towards them. I am not suggesting for a moment that ASD = lack of empathy and know, like all things that there is a spectrum. But I would describe her as very unusually skilled in this area. She had a massive (think huge, epic) tantrum in a neighbouring town when she was 2 and a half. After her nap at home later on that day, she brought it up, saying she was sorry she shouted yesterday, she was just so angry. She refused to go back to the town for at least a year, and also never had another tantrum, which ended about 4 months of big toddler tantrums.
Talk to me! Educate me, or point me in the right place please?